the adventures of thomas pynchon and the infinite sentence
Current subway book is perennial Nobel Prize nominee Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. There's a reason why every pastiche of pretentious postmodern snobbery involves namedropping Pynchon--just having heard of him makes you an insufferable hipster. Imagine that some a bitter, thoroughly Californicated early twentieth century Hollywoodite read Finnegan's Wake and Ulysses and thought, "I could do that," and, well--you have something not too far from the truth? Maybe? (No one really knows Thomas Pynchon, which is probably why douchebags mention him so often--that air of mystery gets people laid.) The first two pages of Lot 49 are comprised of one of the most impenetrable paragraphs I have ever read, surpassed only by his literary antecedents Joyce and Eliot and a certain nineteenth century whaling expert who was paid by the word. Pynchon absolutely does not believe in less is more--in that quasar-dense first paragraph there are three different flashbacks, two references to obscure works of music, a detailed description of what the main protagonist had for dinner and how she prepared it, a synopsis of the TV show she had been watching, introductions for three different major characters--and then we're in a completely different setting and scene than where the paragraph started. Literarily this works as an vivid illustration of the character's meandering thought process and easily distracted nature, but to anyone inexperienced in reading morbidly overwritten postmodern fiction it feels like trying to watch four movies at once after five consecutive shots of Glenlivet.
And this is supposedly Pynchon's most accessible novel.
Fortunately, Pynchon doesn't continue this game of ultra-grandiloquent cockslappery for much longer after that, and by the end of the first chapter the book is pretty readable. Which is kind of worrisome, really...it's like he was trying, with that first couple pages, to frighten away any readers who weren't pompous enough to recognize his genius. Make no mistake, there are still endless early pop culture references and literary allusions and stupid metatextual nods to obscure historical events, but to its credit, it's very much a twentieth century book for twentieth century people--past those first few pages, it is possible for a modern reader to progress to the end without a thirty-page appendix of footnotes. (That's more than I can say for some of Pynchon's contemporaries--but I passive-aggressively digress.) What's interesting about this novel, though, is that it manages to be both this pretentious and authentically American. Up until the modernist era American writing was seen as poor man's literature--all cowboys and gold miners and movie stars, while British, French, and Russian writers were penning intricate tales of class struggle and royal intrigue and noblewomen with massive teacups. Even the noveaux riche aristocracy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby was seen as a reach for an impossible dream--the tragic, futile quest for nobility in a hopelessly ignoble America. In Lot 49, Pynchon says fuck you to all that shit. His characters are Californites, ascended to glory through undeserved family wealth and ties to the silver screen, and they cuss and hang out with hippies based on the Beatles and watch terrible nineteenth century American plays set in eighteenth century Europe, and they're every bit as overprivileged and self-centered and woe-is-me as any fainting English lady in a hoop skirt. There are lots of literary references and embedded poems, but they're all TV shows and pop songs--all of them invented for the book. You could read Lot 49 as either a satire of the Jane Austen steamy rich lady affair novel or the direct ancestor of the modern American shopping and fucking novel, and either way you'd be right. There's a startlingly realistic secondhand description of an impossibly convoluted eighteenth century murder play, a web of violence and intrigue centered around an illegal private mail service, and an titilatting variety of increasingly surreal and improbable acts of adultery. It's wickedly funny, in a horribly tedious sort of way--like a long running joke in which you, the reader, are always the butt.
All this in a book that is, inexplicably, barely more than a hundred and fifty pages long. Written in a style that would suggest the kind of tome you could splatter a bullfrog with.
And, lest anyone mistake this book for a genuine stab at Genius, Pynchon deliberately chooses the absolute worst names imaginable for his characters. A bored housewife named Oedipa? A DJ named Wendell Mucho Maas? An LSD-prescribing psychiatrist named Dr. Hilarius? A barfly named Mike Fallopian? No wonder folks who take this book seriously have been the subject of half a century of hipster jokes.
(On a related note: the San Jose Semaphore is pretty awesome.)
And this is supposedly Pynchon's most accessible novel.
Fortunately, Pynchon doesn't continue this game of ultra-grandiloquent cockslappery for much longer after that, and by the end of the first chapter the book is pretty readable. Which is kind of worrisome, really...it's like he was trying, with that first couple pages, to frighten away any readers who weren't pompous enough to recognize his genius. Make no mistake, there are still endless early pop culture references and literary allusions and stupid metatextual nods to obscure historical events, but to its credit, it's very much a twentieth century book for twentieth century people--past those first few pages, it is possible for a modern reader to progress to the end without a thirty-page appendix of footnotes. (That's more than I can say for some of Pynchon's contemporaries--but I passive-aggressively digress.) What's interesting about this novel, though, is that it manages to be both this pretentious and authentically American. Up until the modernist era American writing was seen as poor man's literature--all cowboys and gold miners and movie stars, while British, French, and Russian writers were penning intricate tales of class struggle and royal intrigue and noblewomen with massive teacups. Even the noveaux riche aristocracy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby was seen as a reach for an impossible dream--the tragic, futile quest for nobility in a hopelessly ignoble America. In Lot 49, Pynchon says fuck you to all that shit. His characters are Californites, ascended to glory through undeserved family wealth and ties to the silver screen, and they cuss and hang out with hippies based on the Beatles and watch terrible nineteenth century American plays set in eighteenth century Europe, and they're every bit as overprivileged and self-centered and woe-is-me as any fainting English lady in a hoop skirt. There are lots of literary references and embedded poems, but they're all TV shows and pop songs--all of them invented for the book. You could read Lot 49 as either a satire of the Jane Austen steamy rich lady affair novel or the direct ancestor of the modern American shopping and fucking novel, and either way you'd be right. There's a startlingly realistic secondhand description of an impossibly convoluted eighteenth century murder play, a web of violence and intrigue centered around an illegal private mail service, and an titilatting variety of increasingly surreal and improbable acts of adultery. It's wickedly funny, in a horribly tedious sort of way--like a long running joke in which you, the reader, are always the butt.
All this in a book that is, inexplicably, barely more than a hundred and fifty pages long. Written in a style that would suggest the kind of tome you could splatter a bullfrog with.
And, lest anyone mistake this book for a genuine stab at Genius, Pynchon deliberately chooses the absolute worst names imaginable for his characters. A bored housewife named Oedipa? A DJ named Wendell Mucho Maas? An LSD-prescribing psychiatrist named Dr. Hilarius? A barfly named Mike Fallopian? No wonder folks who take this book seriously have been the subject of half a century of hipster jokes.
(On a related note: the San Jose Semaphore is pretty awesome.)